In This Updated Myth, Female Intuition Goes Nuclear

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By Daniel Kraus

Feb. 21, 2019

THE CASSANDRABy Sharma Shields

It’s difficult to imagine a myth riper for harvest than that of Cassandra, the tragic Greek figure who uttered prophecies no one believed. She was, to begin with, a woman, and that is what Sharma Shields, in her biting second novel, sinks her sharp teeth into the deepest.

Our Cassandra is Mildred Groves, a woman in her early 20s who is aggravated by a dull life of caring for her irritable, controlling mother and exasperating people with her visions of maudlin future events. But it’s 1944, the sixth year of an endless global war, and opportunity explodes with the founding of the Hanford research center just three hours south of Mildred’s parochial Washington home.

A fabulous typist, the eccentric “Mad Mildred” scores a choice secretarial position among the 40,000 eager Americans recruited to work at Hanford. Most of the outnumbered members of the Women’s Army Corps are tickled by the promise of “plenty of men to choose from,” and Mildred fancies herself a stylish, modern woman in the vein of her favorite actor, Susan Peters.

Shields might have been imagining the 1945 film “Keep Your Powder Dry,” in which Peters, Lana Turner and Laraine Day play a trio of gumptious, lipsticked Wacs having a grand time making America proud during World War II. For a while that is indeed the novel’s tone. “Isn’t this a gas?” raves Beth, Mildred’s beautiful, magnetic new best friend.

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Hanford, of course, is the top-secret nuclear production site affiliated with the Manhattan Project. Though few employees comprehend the nature of “the product” they’re helping birth, Mildred begins to perceive its nature through harrowing premonitions of nuclear fallout, which intrude upon the novel’s screenplay efficiency (you can almost hear Mildred’s banging, clacking keys).

Readers will need a high tolerance for the dream scenes — there are quite a few — but they provide necessary, sickening contrast to the spit-and-polish patriotism via talking coyotes, deformed fetuses and other grotesqueries: “In the liquid’s taut black velvet lifted a hundred tiny faces, agonized, screaming in pain. They emerged like so many bubbles, lifting, writhing, then going flat again.”

What’s a mid-1940s girl in pin curls to do? Shields is too cunning for heroic fantasies. From the get-go, Mildred craves men’s power: “I admired his stridency. I wanted to bake it, to eat it like a large meat loaf so that it would enter my bloodstream and become my own.” She’s carnally drawn to violence, and has to pretend to disapprove of a fistfight: “The fight was a good one: bloody, vicious, impossible to stop until finally Chrome-dome lay groaning, spitting out teeth, at Gordon’s feet. I was sad I’d missed it.”

One Wac gripes, “Men get away with everything,” and Shields herself seems to (rightfully) lay blame for the war and its aftermath on the one sex. Also rightfully, Mildred struggles with her complicity — as a woman ignored, she aches to dish out brutality. Not unlike the atomic bomb, she radiates destruction, either damaging or being damaged by almost everyone around her. Even while acknowledging that all Americans are, in a sense, murderers, Mildred desires the patriarchy’s promise. “You’ll go far for a woman,” her boss purrs, and she wants that, like a soldier wants to shoot, like a bomb wants to drop.

Familiarity with the original Cassandra is not required to appreciate this novel, although those who do know the ancient myth will admire Shields’s skillful tweaks (reminiscent of Jane Smiley’s successful reimagining of King Lear in “A Thousand Acres”). The book’s most visceral update is Mildred’s encounter with Hanford’s “good husband stock.” But nothing is more troubling or more brilliant than Mildred’s horrifying reaction to a trauma that implicates all of us so forcefully that it’s easy to believe Shields is the one blessed — or cursed — with visions of impending ruin.